Base station positioning fot industrial wireless sensor.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have increasingly been employed in a wide range of industrial applications mainly for monitoring, quality control and diagnosis of the industrial equipment and machines. In such industrial applications, one of the most challenging problem is to determine an optimal positions for mounting the wireless sensor nodes for the highest quality in signal reception. It is typically assumed that the sensor nodes used for monitoring the industrial machines are deployed on fixed locations adjacent to the machines, finding the position of the base station is an important problem that requires attention. In most cases, due to the harsh conditions of the industrial environment, it is necessary to utilize more than one base stations to improve the signal quality, which makes the problem more complicated. In this paper, we focus on the problem of estimating the number and optimal position for wireless base stations in an industrial application of WSNs. We present a k-means clustering based method for estimating not only the optimal position, but also the optimal number of the base stations. The simulation result illustrate that increasing the number of the base station to some extend will enhance the communication link quality in industrial environments where there is a huge effect of fading and shadowing.